The handling of data has become extremely important given today's increased demand for, and usage of, data in just about every aspect of society including, but not limited to, business, social, technology, research, etc. Data handling issues include, by way of example only, data variety (heterogeneity), data volume, and data velocity. Adding to the challenge is the fact that data may also be geographically distributed and/or stored in different ways and in different formats in different file or object stores. Thus, a main challenge that has emerged in data storage environments is attempting to unify data query interfaces and building up searchable data catalogues. Typical approaches to this challenge are to build up a metadata catalogue or store original data itself in some form of a database. As used in this context, “metadata” refers to data about the original data.
For example, with regard to bioinformatics data, existing solutions offer either manual tagging of the original data with a relational metadata database or processing and storing the original data in the relational tables. As is known, “bioinformatics” is an interdisciplinary field that develops methods and software tools for understanding biological data.